Summer Fun!: Jobs & Internships Transcript Originally Aired on Friday April 1, 2016 at Noon Facilitated by: Danielle Martinez, Assistant Director of Josh Frahm, STEP (Student to Employed Professional) & Student Employment Coordinator Summer Fun! Jobs & Internships Danielle: Happy Friday Hawkeye parents and families and welcome to our April Parent and Family Webinar. My name is Danielle Martinez and I work in Academic Support and Retention and once again I ll be the moderator for today s webinar. If you are new to our series, we hope that we provide you with some up to date information that may apply to your student s experience here at the. We know that parents and family members are an important part of a student s process and we that by including you and giving you some information on what is going on here on campus as well as how you can best support your student on their journey here, we can all help work towards student success. Today s webinar is about summer fun, as we look towards warmer months and we look towards jobs and internships. Today we have with us, Josh Frahm, who works with us in the Office of Student Employment, and it is actually Josh s birthday, so we would like to wish him a happy birthday! Just as a reminder, each webinar is recorded and then posted on the Academic Support and Retention website so it can be accessed at a later date, or viewed by individuals who are not able to attend our live webinar. Therefore, your mic functions have been muted, but if you have a question, please feel free to type it into the chat box which is on your screen, and we will make sure to answer those questions during the question and answer portion which will be just shortly after Josh s presentation. So without further ado, we ll get right to it with Josh. Happy birthday! Josh: Thank you, Danielle. I really appreciate the birthday wishes; I can t tell you how many jokes I get on this day. The only good thing about having a birthday on April Fool s Day is nobody forgets it and I don t forget, so that is a benefit! Welcome parents and family members, thank you for joining us today. I am going to focus today on jobs and internships and what your student can do to market themselves to gain some employment experience. I m going to talk about some of those things today and hopefully give you guys some information on new trends, things that recruiters are looking for, how your student can benefit from having a job, and how they can market themselves with having a student job and then full time employment eventually. Before I get started, just a little background on myself. As Danielle said, I work in the Student Employment Office, so I ve been at the for about three years. I also teach a professional development course called UI STEP, or student to employed professional, so through that class, I teach about job searching, networking, how to stand out on your job, interviewing skills, things of that nature. I ll bring some of those experiences to the table today. Before being at the, I spent about six years as a recruiter and hiring manager, as well as a supervisor for student advisors on another campus. I will bring some positive stories and some horror stories to the table hopefully today with regards to some of the things we are going to talk about. So discussing out topic today, I m going to start by discussing why students should work over the summer. If any of your kids are coming home and staying with you over the summer, I m sure there is immediately one positive reason they should work, for you, to get them out of the house a little bit, but we are also going to discuss some of the benefits that they can get by working over the summer. We re then going to talk about how you can communicate the importance of them getting involved and just learning outside of the classroom setting. Hopefully through this you will be thinking about some of the tips you can provide to your students as far as how they can stand out when they do get a job and how they can do well on that job. And then if you are looking to help your student gain employment over the summer, we have some resources towards the end that I ll hopefully be providing you to give them some access to jobs and to job sites and some things that we have at the university that may be able to help them, and then I have a few external websites that I 1
use regularly in my career that I provide students that I think really gives some fantastic information. So to start, I always talk about, whether it s with students or parents, is just the future outlook and why student employment is important. When I talk to students, I try to get them to think about it from a recruiter s point of view, and why they should hire you, and why it is important to work. Going through A, B, and C there, asking you the question personally, maybe some of you do this for a living if you are a hiring manager. Who would you hire as an employer? You have three options there, (A) a UI graduate, (B) a UI graduate and three years student job/internship/fellowship experience, or (C) UI graduate and three years student job/internships/fellowship experience, volunteer experience and student organization leader experience. I think if I asked you, who you would hire, it s a pretty obvious answer I think. Most people, and I ask students this too, they ll say C, and I ll say why is that? Well they have more experience to bring to the table, and that is absolutely true. The more that we diversify the students experiences while they are at the university, the more chances they have to learn the skills necessary to be successful as an employee, not just as a student, but when they graduate as well. We ll talk about some of the reasons as to why that is important for employers to see that type of experience. Just to provide you with some facts, these are all 2016 facts, and stuff that I have actually found within the last month, research regarding what employers are looking for, with your students by the time that they graduate. Looking at that first bullet, I think that is a surprise to many people. Just by thinking, hey I m going to school, I m learning a lot of valuable information, but employers are telling me I m not quite ready on average. You ll see fewer than 3 in 10 employers see graduate as ready, and I think a lot of that has to do with applying that knowledge learned in classes into a real world setting. On the campus, we try to do whatever we can in our office to train student supervisors on how to provide those real world settings on the job. Internships are a big part in a student s development to get that real life experience. So we encourage college students to really apply that knowledge as much as they possibly can, and hopefully be able to translate what they are learning in the classroom onto the job. Just looking at that second bullet, the broader college experience when your students first came to the, you have the Iowa challenge, the Iowa EXCEL sync, and things that really focus on getting the students involved on campus. Not only does that help them have a more valuable experience here, but it is really important for their future after Iowa as well. So just doing one thing, any extracurricular involvement, an internship, a student job on campus can double the amount of job opportunities available, which is really crazy to think about. Just having that opportunity to apply what they ve learned in a real world setting can be extremely valuable for them. So you see kind of the seven competencies there the best thing I see when I see these, and they are very similar from year to year in what employers are looking for students is, is that they can learn a lot of this in school, they ll learn a lot of this stuff just by working, whether if that job is within their field of study or not. So I mean you see professional polished teamwork, ownership, curiosity, all of that stuff hopefully they re getting not just in a school setting but outside that classroom setting as well. The consistent consensus over the last several years and this has really changed lately, no matter the industry, skills are really becoming more and more important. GPA and major is still important for a lot of careers, I mean you have your very job specific careers, engineering, accounting, anybody in the medical field. But a lot of jobs now are looking for a skill set and not as much importance is being placed on a major or a GPA. That doesn t mean they can t be fantastic selling points, they absolutely can be. But hopefully, students are able to supplement those technical achievements with additional knowledge that they can apply in work settings as well. Just thinking back to that first question, A, B, or C, I think the big thing from an employer s perspective or a recruiter s perspective, I know when I was hiring new college graduates, the big thing for me was, if I hire somebody who has a lot of work experience coming out of college already, it saves me a lot of time in energy in what I have to do to train that person. I don t have to train them on the value of showing up on time consistently, having a positive attitude, having professional communication at all times. There is a lot less that I have to do and worry about with students who have worked before. That really accentuates the importance of a student gaining work experience. So hopefully if a lot of your students have jobs lined up for the summer, and even if they don t, there are probably quite a few still out there. I know 2
internships are still out there on our Hire a Hawk website as well, and we will go over a few ways that you can help your students in that regard a little bit. This is one thing from a parent s perspective and being in the workforce probably yourself, that you can really talk to your student about. This might be the first time they are out on their own, maybe they ve had jobs before, but they are really in the student mindset, for good reasons obviously. But there is a big difference in a lot of training and conversations that need to take place with your students just disregarding the mindset difference between being a student on campus and being an employee of an organization, company, hospital, wherever your student might end up working. And you can see the difference side to side in the mindset. I think the one thing that students need to understand with regards to the difference is just thinking about, hey, I have a lecture with 300 students in my Intro to Sociology Class for instance. What happens if I am late to class? Honestly, probably not a whole lot. What happens if I miss an assignment deadline by a day? You might get 10% off, some instructors might be a little stricter than that. In a workplace environment, what happens if you are late too often, or miss work too often? There is a pretty good chance you are going to get fired. If you miss too many deadlines, the same thing happens in that circumstance. There is a difference in mindset in the more serious nature of a job and that is very oriented to the organization and not the individual. In college they are focusing on bettering themselves, they are the primary owner of their time, they set their classes. A lot of times there are some limits as to when they can have classes depending on the semester and the classes that are available, but more often than not they have the chance to pick. Obviously, in many situations, we don t get to pick our work hours a lot of the time. So there is a big difference there. I think that it is really important to communicate with our students just some of the differences there and just making sure they are going into a work environment ready to be successful. The bottom there is The Stunning Truth, and that is a statistic that I really like. It might surprise some of you as well. Only 15% of workers are fired for skills pertaining to their job. We are going to talk about just some of those little things your student can do to be successful. A lot of them are basic showing up on time, being professional, communicating effectively with peers, clients, customers, or whoever that may be. So a story that I always like to share is that in my career I had to fire eight people. One of those people I fired due to skills pertaining to the job. So very close to that is what the statistic is. What I talk to students about is that one young professional took me a year to fire him. He couldn t do the job from the first day he started until the last day he left, but it took me a year to end up getting rid of him and getting somebody else. Students always ask why did it take so long? Well, he did everything right. He knew he was struggling, he came and asked me for help, he went to fellow team members for help. He proactively went and shadowed somebody on his off shift and looked to gain assistance that way. Everybody liked him, he was nice to the student he talked to, so really he was everything that I wanted in an employee except for the fact that he couldn t do his job well. But just for the fact that he did a lot of those little things really well and he understood what hard work was all about and did a lot of those basics right, it took me a long time to get to the point where I had to find somebody else because I really wanted him to succeed. So for you talking with your students about working, I think focusing on some of those basics, focusing on just the little things that they can do to stand out. I call it, Always control the controllables. There are a lot of things about our jobs and careers that we cannot control, especially if you work for a bigger organization. But what you can control are some of these things listed. How do you do the normal things that are expected of you, show up on time, dress code, not using cell phones when inappropriate I think that is a big issue these days, not just with students but with all professionals. And that fifth bullet, I put that in all caps for a reason. Just being proactive. We have so many distractions these days. Most jobs you have the internet at your fingertips, you have your phone on you, so teaching your students how to stand out on the job. But what happens when you are done with your work? For me, that tells me a lot about a young professional as well, what they do in that circumstance. When they are done with their work, do they go right to the internet or do they go right to their phone, or do they ask their supervisor if there is anything they can help with. Do they talk to their fellow coworkers and see if they can help in any way? Those are the young professionals that really stand out in the workplace, so I would encourage you to talk to your students about that. Talk to them about their jobs. I know a lot of you probably ask them how is school going, well if they are working in the summer, ask them how their job is going as well. You can talk to them specifically about situations they face, and hopefully give them some advice on situations you have dealt with and 3
how you ve helped improve yourself in that way as well. So just a few things there that can kind of work with the basics to help your students stand out. Like I said, I think the conversations about their jobs are going to be so critical when they work during the summer, especially those of you that have a son or daughter living at home. Talk to them about how to stand out in the workplace. Just reading some of these, I kind of highlighted 4, 6, and 7 specifically. Their mindset in regards to their job. Are they just worried about their job or are they trying to learn a little bit more? I think focusing on them learning a little bit about what the organizations is all about on top of just their role can be a great way to help them get noticed. Projecting the right image is always important for a young professional. To develop a reputation for being trustworthy like we said earlier, hitting all of those deadlines, doing what you can to over deliver and trying to raise their visibility as much as possible, which honestly comes from just asking for more work sometimes. Asking for responsibility and volunteering for things are great ways to become a go to person. And then I always recommend for students to get a mentor at their job. I think at home; you can help with that. You can help mentor them as far as being successful in the workplace, but what else can they do to reach out to other co workers, to supervisors, to help give them a leg up. What questions can they ask them, can they give them advice on how to get a full time job if you are in an internship? What can you do to improve from an employee standpoint? Have you ever gotten a look from a student when you talk about them getting a job? Why should I work, Mom? Why should I work, Dad? I think we get that question a lot especially for incoming freshmen when we go through orientation and things like that. And some of you might have experienced that in the past as well. So just some reasons to talk to them about why they should get a job over the summer. There are obvious reasons like the resume builder, but I think the reference opportunities are super important for students specifically. When I talk to students about references in particular, I always encourage them to get a minimum of 3 to 5 references. This could be supervisors, this could be mentors they have on campus, it could be professors that know they very well. When I talk about that, I discuss my own experiences. I think one of my favorite parts of my past job from an entertainment standpoint, was calling references. That was part of it when we got towards the end, I would call references, I d get people who would list their parents, I would get people who would list somebody would had fired them in the past. I would get people who didn t tell their references that they were listing them as a reference. We get that all the time, so encourage your students to do a great job of talking regularly with their supervisor and people that they work with on a regular basis to ask for those references. Those are going to be super important in their future career search as well. Looking at the rest of them, I think looking at what you like and dislike in the work environment is so important because there are a lot of students that switch majors. It just happens. A lot of people come into school not knowing exactly what they want to do. I was that student, I switched majors four times within the business school alone when I was at the. I think the more experiences they gain in the work environment, the more they will be able to figure out what it is they like and what it is they don t like. As part of my UI STEP program, I have a student organization. One of the students who was my president for about a year and a half before she graduated, she had three internships between her sophomore year to her senior year and all of them were specifically involved with the major she had at the time, and every single time she had that internship, she ended up changing majors. So she figured out through her experiences that that is not what she wanted to do for the rest of her life. And now being a graduate, she ended up coming back and is working in a lab here at the, which was her student job during the school year. So the best thing for her, and I commend her for this all the time, is her willingness to get involved and gain those experiences. Helps save her a lot of stress in the long run. I d much rather have students figure that out now than in their career for five years and then getting close to thirty and have to restart their career and think about it from level one. Learning what you like and dislike can really help the students figure out where they want to go academically as well. And we have a lot of students who end up, based on their student job, going into that field. My boss is a fantastic example. She has been at Iowa for 34 years now. She was a biology major but she worked in the financial aid office. She has worked in the financial aid office now for 34 years. So just the fact that she was willing to work as a student and found what she really enjoyed has led to a great career for her. So a lot of things can be gained from that experience. Hopefully your students see that and if they need a little convincing, hopefully you can provide that 4
for them. Or you can send them to me, I d be happy to do it myself as well, and give them some statistics and just some personal experiences that can steer them in that direction. So just to finish off today, there are a number of resources that your student can use to really put themselves in a good position. Here are three resources. The Pomerantz Career Center is a fantastic website where there are a lot of resources where you can find stuff on resumes, cover letters, networking events, career fairs that are upcoming, they do one on one advising, they do a ton of career development courses now that students can take and I would highly recommend. There are a lot of great information and resources out there. I tell students all the time, you are paying for this stuff as part of your tuition, so utilize it! If I go back and try to get my own personal career coach, it s going to probably cost me some money. They have that as part of their tuition here at the university. Getting them to take advantage of those resources while they are here is something they should definitely do. That bottom link is Hire a Hawk, that is our specific system that we use to post not just student employment jobs, but also internships and full time jobs on that same system. This is a system where employers are coming directly to the because they are looking for students. Having your student utilize those resources if they are looking for a summer job, they can search via that Hire a Hawk system. And then finally, here is just some additional career related websites that I use for my classes, and that I use to kind of stay up to date on specific trends. There is some fantastic stuff here, some entertaining things as well, some things where they can research their future career, they can take a look at some information like what is their expected salary in this career, how can we assist in your job search, how can we go out in different ways that these resources can help. I believe Danielle will talk a little bit about the Archives session, but these websites should be available for you if you want to utilize them or if you want to provide these to your student. I think that is pretty much all for me, and I ll hand it to Danielle. Danielle: Awesome, thanks so much Josh for all of the great information. Josh is correct, when we send out sort of a survey on how folks are liking the parents and family webinars and what you might want to hear about in the future, we will send all of the links that Josh has mentioned if you want to click directly on what is going on, or want to work directly with your student on searching for a job, you can do that as well. We are going to move into the question and answer portion, so just as a reminder, we have lots of folks on the webinar, so we won t be able to answer specifics about your student s experience, but can provide general information that might be helpful in guiding your student. So if you have a question, please feel free to type it into the question box and we will do our best to answer them. If we don t answer your question, we will make sure that we outreach to you via email. And then a staff member will connect with you. So it looks like we have some questions coming in. Q & A Danielle: Are evaluations for student employees required? What kind of feedback do they get that might be helpful for them? Josh: That is a great question, and to be honest, this really depends on the department. There are roughly 250 departments at the, so a lot of them do things in different ways. We know that some are better at providing that than others, so what we try to do as an office is to make sure specifically that all of our departments have the resources necessary to provide that feedback. We encourage one on one type feedback; we encourage regular reviews. One thing our office has done is provided resources from a procedural standpoint, we provide employers with sample reviews and really encourage continuous communication. I think that it is important for our supervisors to know that they are part of the education of the student, so whether they signed up for it or not, they are really part of that education experience from a teaching standpoint, they are just teaching in a little bit of a different way. So it varies, but we have seen a lot of improvement in that increasing as far as the amount of feedback that students are getting and we are definitely going to continue to try to increase the awareness of supervisors on what their role should be. 5
Danielle: So Josh, another question that we got is, do first year students often get hired as interns at companies? Or what kind of companies hire first year students? Josh: There are some that hire first year students. I think after your sophomore year is probably the best time to start looking, but at the same time, I ve had students specifically if they have become particularly involved in classes they are interested in on campus, students who go to office hours regularly, form a relationship with the instructor, and they offer them a research position, or they offer them an internship. So I would really recommend being proactive in their classes, especially ones that they like because you never know what can come out of that. One thing to note is that a lot of their professors have been in the field so it is great way to network and learn a lot about their field and learn a lot of about opportunities out there that may not be advertised. Danielle: So we have more of a scenario question now. If a student has been working on campus and then they go home for the summer and they return back the next fall, can they return back to that same job? Josh: Yeah, and there are plenty of jobs like that. On the job posting, especially if they use the Hire a Hawk system, they will say the duration on that, they will let the student know if they are requiring summer as part of the job. So we encourage students, if you read through it and they are looking for somebody to work through the summer, maybe don t apply for that and go onto the next job available. The good thing for students is that there is such a variety at any given time, we could have anywhere from 250 to, when it gets close to the semester, 700 or 800 jobs posted. They are all in the surrounding Iowa City area. About 40% of those on a normal basis are right on campus here. So there are a lot of options but that falls on the student during the application process or at the very least, interview process. Danielle: So we have another question about planning for next year. So students who have secured a work study and want to make sure that they secure an on campus job for their second year or maybe even their third year, when is a good time to go onto Hire a Hawk to look for a job in the fall semester? There is a question about if it should be in August or sooner rather than later? Josh: Employers can post jobs for next year at any given time, so we have actually recommended that employers post it as early as possible so they can fill their positions early and they don t have to worry about the hiring process during the onboarding period in the fall where there a tons of new students, there is tons of stuff going on, you are extremely busy. The same is from a student s perspective. I wouldn t wait until August, even though you can, and there will be a lot of jobs out there. Starting in May or June they are posting and we post every single day. Now I would say it doesn t really pick up until mid to end of July and that is when you will start to get more and more jobs that are posted. But it is not going to hurt for the student to go on there regularly. The best thing about the system too, is they can save their searches and have any matching jobs based on their preferences emailed to them, so they don t really have to go out there and search for jobs every single day, they can set up the search for themselves. So again, with Hire a Hawk, if they have any questions on that, our office will definitely help. We have also created some tutorials and step by step instructions for students on how to use that. My advice is to start as early as possible to beat the mad rush of everyone coming back looking for jobs at the same time. Danielle: So our last question is, what advice or tips do you have for students to best balance their course work and their life as a student employee? Josh: That is a normal question that we get. If my student works 10 hours a week, that is 10 hours that they can spend studying. While that is technically true, I think that the majority of our students, and I ask this exact question in each of my work course development sections that I have, there is about 10 of them every semester. I ask the question, do you think that having a job on campus helps or hurts your academics? The majority of them say it helps, and I ask them why, that makes no sense, you have less time to study, and the answer I get consistently is, it forces them to manage their time better. They don t have time to procrastinate, they don t have time to get into bad habits with regards to that. I know my first two years at Iowa I didn t work and I tell the students I got super great at playing PlayStation, but I didn t get a lot of 6
benefit out of that either financially or from a developmental standpoint. I think time management is the big advantage of working on campus because employers on our campus are great at working with students schedules as well. If you have a midterm or something like that, as long as you are telling them ahead of time, they ll work around that for your work schedule and things like that. They improve their time management consistently over time. Danielle: That is all the time we have today for questions. Thank you so much for joining us. Please note that all of our webinars are posted online at uc.uiowa.edu/family resources. If we were unable to get your question answered during the webinar, we will follow up with you via email, and if you have an additional question, please feel free to send it to us at uc retention@uiowa.edu for a response from a staff member. So please join us next month, which will be our last webinar of this academic year, which is Homeward Bound: Managing the Summer Transition and Getting to Year 2 with Academic Support and Retention and University Counseling Service and that will be Friday, May 6 th from noon to 1 PM. We thank you so much for joining us, and we hope you have a great rest of your Friday. On Iowa, Go Hawks! 7